from the please-support-us dept

In the summer of 2014, we ran a crowdfunding campaign to help support Techdirt, in order to do more in-depth reporting on the big net neutrality fight happening in Washington, DC (and, more broadly, around the globe). That campaign was successful beyond our wildest expectations, and allowed us to do much more thorough reporting (including bringing on Karl Bode to help cover these issues) on such an important issue. We ended up writing well over 300 articles since that campaign ended, and that initiative is still ongoing.

Now, we're launching another crowdfunding campaign for an issue that's even more important: the fight over encryption. And so I wanted to ask you to support us again in this new campaign. We literally cannot do this without you:

As you almost certainly know, this battle has ramped up in the last few years -- first in response to the Snowden revelations, followed by a rush by many, including Apple, to better encrypt their services and devices. However, law enforcement and the intelligence communities are less than pleased about all of this, and have been pushing for backdoors and other legislative solutions. This is not new. They pushed for such things in the 1990s, in the original "Crypto Wars," and lost. But now they see a new opening to try again. In the last couple weeks, this issue has blown up even more, as the DOJ sought, and received, a court order directing Apple to effectively write special software to allow the FBI to hack into an iPhone to get around existing encryption and security features.

And, it's not just about this current Apple fight. Or just the US. Congress is looking at this issue, and other governments are eagerly considering how they can use the US's efforts to serve their own wishes. And that's not to mention various other technologies and companies that have been impacted by this debate already.

This is a big deal. It will impact how technology works and how you maintain your security and privacy going forward. It will impact what you get to do on your own devices, and what the government can force companies to do. And not just in the US. The rest of the world is watching closely how this battle plays out, to figure out what they might be able to get away with as well.

And, frankly, most of the reporting is abysmal or, at the very least, confused. When the story of the Apple court order broke, most initial reports falsely stated that the court ordered Apple to "break the encryption" on its phones. We were the first site (and for a while, the only site) to post the actual court order and to discuss what it actually said.

And this is a case where the specifics and the details matter... a lot. We want to be able to do a lot more reporting like this, really digging into the issues and explaining them in a way that everyone can understand and focus on the facts, rather than the fearmongering.

But to do that, we need your support. Believe it or not, writing about the arcane details at the intersection of technology and policy does not attract big time advertisers. In fact, we've lost many advertisers due to our willingness to call out bad behavior by large companies.

As with the last campaign, the focus is in funding our ongoing reporting on this issue, but we also are hoping to do some creative experiments as well, to further expand the reach of that reporting. So, if we can reach our initial target of $20,000, we'll use some of that money to buy a large number of targeted ads in publications that are read by policymakers in DC (and their constituents), that link back to our reporting. For each $10,000 beyond that that we reach, we'll add another experiment in ways to have our reporting actually reach more people -- including policymakers, the public, and the press.

If you supported us last time around (or in other ways, such as via our Techdirt Insider Shop), I can't thank you enough for your support, and I hope that you found our reporting on net neutrality useful and valuable. If you haven't supported us in the past, please consider doing so now. We strive to not only do great reporting on these issues -- which means actually going beyond just the "he said, she said" versions to calling out blatant lies and hypocrisy when we see it -- but to also build a community here. That means we work extra hard to welcome in people to comment and discuss issues, and we try to avoid the practices adopted by many other sites to push people away. We don't do "paywalls." We don't demand that you turn off ad blockers. Hell, we let you turn ads off on the site. And we also do things like better protect you by still being one of only a few news sites that is fully HTTPS encrypted.

But all of that costs us. Calling out companies means that lots of companies don't want to advertise with us. The ability to turn off ads and only accept HTTPS ads means that our ad revenue is significantly limited. But we still think it's worth it, because focusing on building a better, more engaged community here, where you're welcome to participate, is really important to us. But it also means that, every so often, we may reach out for some help. And now is one of those times. So please consider supporting us.

from the bad-or-worst? dept

There are lots of criticisms of free trade agreements, especially the fact that they go far beyond "free trade" — but the Trans-Pacific Partnership truly takes the cake. This week, we're joined by Maira Sutton, the EFF's Global Policy Analyst, to discuss the many problems with the TPP. Tellingly, this episode is nearly twice as long as usual.

from the so-many-numbers dept

It's become something of a yearly tradition around here, soon after the new year, to tally up some of the stats from the just completed year. If you'd like to look back at them all, you can see "the numbers" from 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010 when we started this little tradition.

In 2015, we had visitors from 235 countries -- down from 240 the year before. Of course, towards the bottom of the list there are very very few visits, and there is some debate over whether or not some of these actually count as countries. As always happens, visitors from the US gave us almost exactly two-thirds of our traffic (66.82% -- down just a hair from 66.95% the year before). Canada (just barely) nudged out the UK as the number two country, providing 6.54% of our visitors, with the UK at 6.46%. Australia and Germany round out the top five again. The next five countries are exactly the same from 2014: India, the Netherlands, France, Sweden and New Zealand.

Last year, we noted that the Philippines was the surprise winner for the second most visitors from Asia (after India), but this year Singapore passed the Philippines. After that there's Turkey (if you consider Turkey a part of Asia), Japan, Israel (same note as Turkey) and Indonesia. China provided very, very few visits, which isn't a huge surprise as we've been told at times that we've been blocked in the country.

The top countries in Europe, obviously, are mostly listed above in the overall top 10, but in case you're wondering, the next five top European countries are: Italy, Ireland, Spain, Finland and Norway. Again, these are the same countries as last year, but with a bit of movement among the countries (Italy moved up, while Spain moved down), but all five of those countries send a similar amount of traffic (between 2 and 3% of our total traffic for each of those five).

Across the Americas, obviously US and Canada are the two biggest (by far), but they're followed by Brazil, Mexico and Argentina (again, same as last year!). In Africa, once again, South Africa provides the most visitors, but unlike in past years where that was the only really significant traffic, this year Kenya drove a lot of traffic (perhaps because a Kenyan lawyer wrote a blog post, and a series of angry emails to me, where he cc'd others) claiming that my critique of Kenyan copyright law was "defamatory." Nigeria, Egypt and Algeria round out the top five.

For years we joked that we got no visits from North Korea, but in 2013 we got 2, and last year that doubled to four. In 2015, however, it went back down to zero. They must be really cracking down on internet access. Also, every year that we've done this, we've joked about the fact that we appear to get a single visit from Christmas Island... but that went away this year. Sorry to whomever I offended there.

As is always the case, the longest visits are from Gibralter (by an insane amount), and every year PaulT takes credit for this (thanks Paul!). If we look at countries that send significant traffic, the Kiwis down in New Zealand stick around the longest, followed by the Canadians. That's two countries somewhat well known for having friendly people, so they also seem to like spending more time on Techdirt. That rocks. Of countries that send a lot of traffic, visitors from India check out the most pages per visit.

Moving on to city data, the numbers here look pretty much the same as always: New York, London, LA, San Francisco and Chicago (identical to last year's list). The next five on the list changed a bit though. In 2015 it was Toronto, Washington DC, Seattle, Houston and Sydney. The big mover was... Washington DC, which hadn't been in the top 10 before. As I've noted in the past, it's tough to make too much of the city data, considering the differences in population.

On the technology front, Chrome continues to be the primary browser people use to visit the site (47.94% of visits), followed by Firefox (19.15%) and Safari (14.33%). Remember the good old days when Microsoft was abusing its monopoly power to own the browser market? Whatever happened to those guys? Mobile traffic continued to grow, but not that much. Last year it was about 36% and this year it 39%. For the first time Android has edged out iOS. In 2014 they were close, but iOS was 51% of mobile visits and Android at 44%. But in 2015, they were both at 47%, with Android just barely higher. Windows Phone makes up most of the rest, with a tiny few folks on Blackberry and Series40. Also, someone out there visits with Nintendo 3DS. Who are you?

Not surprisingly the iPhone represents 32% of all mobile visits and another 14% comes from the iPad. For Android devices, the Google Nexus 5 is the leader, followed closely by the Samsung S5 and the Google Nexus 7. In fact, basically all of the top Android devices are either Google Nexuses (Nexi?) or Samsung Galaxies. The first device that's not one of those is the OnePlus One... but that's the phone I use, so perhaps it distorts the stats.

Not surprisingly, the biggest ISPs for traffic are Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon. I'm actually a bit surprised to see AT&T drop pretty far down the list, behind Charter and Cox.

The percentage of people who are coming "direct" to Techdirt, rather than from third parties, is increasing. Last year it was 30.5%. This year it's 38.5%.

To me, that's a good thing. Lots of sites spend lots of time focusing on gaming search engines or social media with click bait. We try to focus on building a loyal community of readers who like to come back. However, when people are coming from other sites, they're most frequently coming from Reddit (34% of our referral traffic), followed by Facebook and then Twitter. The big drivers of non-social traffic were: Instapundit, Daily Rotation, Boing Boing, Hacker News, Fark, Slashdot and Ars Technica. Not too many surprises there. Popehat was on last year's list, but apparently Ken White and friends have stopped linking to me.

In terms of search traffic, for the second year in a row (unfortunately), the single biggest driver of traffic were... searches for "Walter O'Brien" -- the guy who appears to have lied his way to a prime time show on CBS. Also, lots of searches on AT&T and Comcast...

There's a pretty good mix of stories there. Net neutrality/ISP/cord cutting stuff gets a lot of attention, a few stories on copyright. Some free speech stuff. Politicians acting badly. Basically the key kinds of stories we regularly cover. I'm glad that you guys like them.

We point this out every year, but again it's worth noting that there's almost no overlap between the two lists above. Just because a story gets a lot of comments, it doesn't mean that it's getting a lot of traffic (often, it means that two or three people are engaged in a long debate). Similarly some high traffic posts don't get that many comments. There's only one story on both lists.

The top two slots are the same as they were last year, though John Fenderson's comment total was cut by almost 50% -- what a slacker! Either way, this makes four years in a row that John is our top commenter. That's quite a streak. PaulT is the only one who has been on this list every year since we started, and nasch only missed it one year. Also, last year I made the 9th slot myself, and I noted an oddity: I only seemed to appear in the lists for even years (2010, 2012 and 2014). And, so I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that I didn't make the cut in 2015. Such is life! But, watch out for my comments in 2016. The "newcomers" to the list this year are Uriel-238, tqk and Sheogorath. Nice work.

Top 10 Most Insightful Commenters, based on how many times they got the lightbulb icon:

Continuing a trend we saw last year, it's getting harder and harder to get the funny icon with any real consistency. But, a special callout needs to go to TechDescartes, who appears to have just shown up on the site very recently, but is getting an insane number of funny comment awards (and a bunch of insightful comments too). Keep it up! It reminds me of the old days when Karl used to dominate the insightful column (come back Karl!).

Okay, that's it. I think we've now officially closed the books on 2015 and I look forward to an eventful 2016...

from the it-seems-like-a-struggle,-but-lots-to-be-happy-about dept

Since 2008, I've always concluded the year with a post in which I take a step back and reflect on (1) how I continue to remain optimistic despite lots of negative news (2) the overall forward progress of innovation, even while so many stories play up the negative and (3) the power to keep that forward progress moving. It started after I had a few people question how I remained so optimistic and happy, despite writing so many stories that seemed somewhat infuriating. But, as I noted at the time, the infuriating parts were mostly about attempts by people (often those in power) to hold back the pace of innovation. The forward progress of innovation marches on, however. And thus, we can and should be happy about that, even if we're angry about the pace and the efforts to hinder that pace. It's about understanding the difference between relative and absolute change. We should be happy with where things are headed, even if we're upset about the pace at which things are moving.

If you'd like to see all of the historical New Year's Message posts, they're here:

Last year I started off by noting that I expected that message to be a bit of a downer, as it felt like things had been an even bigger struggle than in the past. But as I looked over the details, I realized it was the same story again. Yes, it was a struggle against forces that sought to stop progress, but the frustration was more about the pace, rather than the overall direction. And the same is true this year. At first I felt like perhaps things did move a little backwards this year, but upon reflection that's not actually the case. Potentially it feels worse because of a few bits of bad news at the very end of the year, coloring the view over the entire year.

On the whole, however, there were lots of truly positive things this year. The FCC really did pass real net neutrality rules and has at least taken some steps towards enforcing them (and even just having those rules in place "magically" made the big broadband providers suddenly figure out how to stop Netflix from being throttled). Yes, there are challenges in place to those rules, including a legal challenge and attempts to route around the rules through data caps and zero rating, but overall the net neutrality fight was a huge win for the internet. At the beginning of the process, in 2014 it was "common knowledge" that there was no way the FCC would make use of its Title II powers to put in place real net neutrality rules -- and yet, thanks to the internet speaking out, it did exactly that in 2015.

On the surveillance front, I know there's lots of reasonable concern and criticism about it, but the USA FREEDOM Act really was the first significant surveillance reform package that restricted some surveillance activities in well over a decade. That's a huge win. No, it didn't go far enough. Yes, there are many other concerns about what USA FREEDOM does allow, as well as what other legal authorities allow, but the bill was still a step in the right direction. Yes, there are concerns about other efforts, like CISA (eventually passed in the Omnibus bill as the "Cybersecurity Act of 2015"), but getting at least some surveillance reform was a big deal. And, despite what some think, there are huge opportunities to push for even bigger wins in the future against mass surveillance. But this is going to require a really big fight, especially as countries like the UK take a massive step backwards on this issue.

Similarly, the fight over backdooring encryption is a key one that we've been focusing on, but so far it's been a pretty big success. While tech companies used to basically ignore encryption entirely, Apple has been out front and center banging the drum on the importance of encryption. And, yes, the recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino (despite a lack of encryption being key to either attack) have given the enemies of encryption a new foothold to argue their nonsense, but cooler heads in both Congress and the White House both seem to recognize that what's being asked for is both magic pixie dust... and basically impossible.

In the meantime, though, stronger encryption and privacy is becoming much more standard. Apple has made encryption on phones a default and Google has been moving in that direction too. Consumer friendly apps like Signal are making communications encryption much more accessible. More and more websites are moving to HTTPS and DNSSEC. The forward progress of technology is making many of the political debates... obsolete.

On the copyright front, there were some huge victories, including a really great ruling on fair use in the Author's Guild case against Google Books. It's a ruling that will get cited time and time again in copyright/fair use cases. The 9th Circuit corrected its huge mistake from a year earlier in saying that an actress had a copyright interest in her performance in a movie. And it was made clear that Warner/Chappell no longer can shake down everyone for singing "Happy Birthday." Yes, there were some bad rulings as well, including the ruling over Cox's DMCA protections, but that's just at the district court level, and we can hope that it will get fixed in later rounds.

More importantly, there are indications that many in Congress are finally realizing that copyright law does not work well with the internet today, and there appears to be some willingness to fix the problems of statutory damages and the use of the DMCA for outright censorship.

On patents, we still have not gotten the necessary patent reform out of Congress, but courts are still showing an increasing willingness to pushback on abuse, and hopefully that continues into the new year.

Yes, there's still much to be done. We could use lots of legal reforms on issues: patent law, copyright law, the CFAA, ECPA and surveillance all still need fixing. But, again, there's been forward progress on many of these items, and things that were considered off the table only a year ago are now entirely within the realm of possibility.

Meanwhile, innovation itself continues to move forward. I've talked about new consumer-friendly tools for privacy and encryption, and that is likely to increase over the next year. Similarly, we're seeing new powerful innovations that I hope will address many of the other policy challenges that we're facing. While politicians and legacy industries bemoan technology "outpacing" the law, I keep seeing examples of technology doing a much better job providing the public with what it needs, rather than policy makers trying to create laws to do the same.

On the Techdirt front, we had another fun year of discussions and conversations. Our biggest news was the launch of our think tank, The Copia Institute, which released some papers and held our first summit and some additional gatherings. Expect a lot more on that front in the coming year. We're also working on some additional things for the Techdirt community itself, so stay tuned.

As always, I'd like to conclude with a giant thank you to everyone here who's a part of the Techdirt community. As I've said in the past, you're the ones who make all of this worthwhile, no matter how you engage. Whether you comment or lurk. Whether we're something you share with all your friends, or are just a guilty pleasure you keep to yourself. Whether you submit stories or engage with us. We appreciate that you're a part of this community, and that you're passionate about all that we discuss.

We know that lots of websites are rejecting their own communities these days -- turning off comments, putting up paywalls, and blocking people from reading if they have ad blockers on. We've gone in the other direction on all of these things and that's because we don't look upon each person as an opportunity to exploit, but rather a community member who we hope will participate in some way.

I've been doing this for 18 incredible years and I don't intend to slow down any time soon. This remains the best job in the world -- to write about and discuss these issues with all of you. Any time I get annoyed at what's happening in the world, it's the folks here who not only prop me up, but help me see through the clutter. I know that some of you are more optimistic than others, and some are more cynical. But overall, the depth and knowledge and passion of this community are what makes this all worthwhile.

from the all-the-links! dept

As several subscribers to our Techdirt Daily Newsletter have pointed out to us, Thursday morning's edition was flagged by Gmail with the following warning:

"Be careful with this message. It contains links to websites hosting malware."

Of course, being a collection of the previous day's Techdirt posts, the Techdirt Daily email contains many, many links. Also, as it is something of a Techdirt policy to not spread malware to our readers, our writers are generally careful about the sites they link to in their posts. So, trying to track down which link might be to a site Google deems suspicious seemed daunting. But it turns out we didn't have to look any further than the third post to figure out what happened, the title of which conveniently contains the word "malware." Within that post, Tim Cushing included the domain name of a site that has been known in the past to distribute malware (in addition to squatting on a domain using the Electronic Frontier Foundation's name). It appears Google took that unlinked mention of the domain name as Techdirt carelessly endangering the digital lives of our newsletter subscribers, and stepped in to protect those subscribed via Gmail by throwing up the scary red warning banner and squashing every link in the email (even the unsubscribe link!).

While it's nice that Google tries to look out for its users by preventing them from inadvertently downloading malware, their approach is a bit over the top. First, if Google can detect which links in an email may be hazardous, why not just unlink or censor those particular links? And, in this case, the "link" in question didn't even exist. Google should be able to detect that and realize that no, we're not sending our readers to their doom. It seems obvious that Google should be able to handle this type of thing in a much more sophisticated way -- and you'd think that it would want to do so. People trust Google and many people use its products, and when it makes mistakes like this, it can cause real reputational harm.

from the killswitch dept

The latest Techdirt podcast is a bit different from our usual fare. This was actually a panel discussion, held back in December at the offices of BitTorrent, right before they did a showing of Killswitch, a new documentary about the battle to control the internet. The panel discussion was wide-ranging, touching on issues from net neutrality to cybersecurity to surveillance, copyright, patents and more. I moderated the panel, which consisted of Evan Engstrom from Engine, Rainey Reitman from EFF, Eric Klinker from BitTorrent and Ali Akbarzadeh, the director of Killswitch. It was a good discussion about the various threats that are facing the internet today, and what's being done about them.

from the counting-it-up dept

2014 is over, and as we've done every year for the past few years, we'll try to round up some of "the numbers" about that year (and yes, this is our only post today -- we'll be back on Monday with regular posting). If you'd like to look back, we've got the posts from 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010.

We had visitors from 240 countries this year, with (as per usual) the US holding steady at almost exactly two-thirds of all traffic (actually 66.95%). This was followed by the UK, Canada and Australia. Germany rounds out the top five with India, the Netherlands, France, Sweden and New Zealand making the top 10. The only major change here was India jumping up a few slots and Sweden dropping a few. After India, our top traffic from Asia comes from... the Philippines -- which is a bit of a surprise. Singapore, Turkey (and yes, I know some people debate whether Turkey is part of Asia) and Japan round out the top five Asian countries for traffic. China doesn't even make the top 10 (it's 11th), though we frequently hear that the site is blocked there.

The top five countries in Europe all made the top 10 list above, but in case you're wondering, the next five are Spain, Ireland, Finland, Italy and Norway -- all of which sent a healthy amount of traffic. If we combine all of the Americas after the US and Canada, the most traffic comes from Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. In Africa, again the top country is South Africa, but we still get a decent number of visitors from Nigeria, Kenya and Egypt as well.

Last year we noted that the only two countries on the map (leaving out tiny islands and such) that we could see where we got no traffic was Chad and Western Sahara. This year, however, we appear to have had 30 visits from Chad. Western Sahara, however, remains a dark zone. For years, we joked about no visits from North Korea, so last year we were amazed that we got two whole visits from that country. This year... it doubled to four, but I'm assuming at least two of those were the supposed Sony Hackers, right? And, in what's become an annual tradition, we have a single visit from Christmas Island.

Also, a yearly tradition: visitors from Gibraltar stick around the longest -- something that PaulT takes credit for each year (rightfully so). If we limit it to countries where we have a significant number of visitors, folks from Australia, Switzerland and New Zealand seemed to stick around the longest, so thanks for that! In terms of the number of pages per visit, Gibraltar, Bangladesh and... Congo top the list, but based on fairly small numbers of visits. If we look at countries with significant visits, India, the Philippines and Switzerland top that list.

I always enjoy digging down into the city numbers as well. The top spots remain pretty much unchanged: New York City, London, LA and Chicago. Toronto fell out of the fourth slot down to sixth, with San Francisco moving up. Seattle, Sydney, Houston and Melbourne rounded out the top 10 with Washington DC coming in 11th. As always, it's interesting to see this data, but given the differences in population size, perhaps it's not always that meaningful.

As always, it's interesting to see how some of you are visiting the site. Remember when Microsoft was going to dominate the world with Internet Explorer? Almost half of all visits these days come from Chrome. Firefox is second and Safari is third. Internet Explorer is fourth, though still with a fair bit of usage (who are you people?). Approximately 36% of our traffic is mobile these days -- jumping up from 29% last year. Most of that is from phones, but plenty of tablet users as well. As per usual, the iPhone and the iPad absolutely dominate the device side, but if we just look at browser OS, Android is almost neck and neck with iOS. Android represented 44% of mobile visits, with iOS at 51%. Windows was a little under 4%, Blackberry about half a percent, and you Nokia loyalists with a combination of Series40, SymbianOS and others make up the remaining tiny percentages. Outside of Apple, mobile visitors came most on Samsung devices and then LG, but coming from a wide variety of devices from those companies.

Given how many of you are from the US, and how the US broadband market works here, it's no surprise that the biggest ISPs for traffic are Comcast, followed by Time Warner (if they merge the numbers from the two would be massive). Verizon and AT&T make up the next two.

As for how people come here, it seems like we have a pretty balanced split. We've never focused on doing things like "gaming" search with search engine optimization, or going for social with clickbait, and so we don't end up relying too much on anything.

In terms of where people came from -- once again Reddit was a major source of traffic. On the "social media" side, this was followed by Facebook and Twitter, with Stumbleupon far behind them. Google+ sent a few (but not very many). From the non-"social" side, we got our most traffic from Instapundit, Boing Boing, Daily Rotation, Popehat and Slashdot. On the search side, the only really noticeable search term that drove significant traffic (outside of people searching for "techdirt" "tech dirt" and variations of that) was... "Walter O'Brien." And yes, our Walter O'Brien stories continue to get a fair number of visits and comments as people discover that his public story is mostly made up.

So you'll notice there are two old stories in there. One from 2010 and another from 2011 -- though both about the same thing (a guy discovering an FBI tracking device on his car and then posting it on Reddit). For whatever reason, Reddit suddenly picked up on that story again and drove a tremendous amount of traffic to it (well, mainly to the one about him suing the FBI, and that resulted in people clicking through to the other one as well). In case you think those shouldn't count, the next two biggest stories were... the first Walter O'Brien story and one about Verizon basically admitting that it was its own fault that its network got clogged (while it attempted to blame Netflix).

Once again -- as we point out every year -- we see very little overlap between these two lists. Only one story (the Keurig DRM one) made both lists (in the second spot on both too). Also something that stood out to me -- while not a single one of the top 10 traffic getting posts were written by Tim Geigner, 4 of the top 10 commented posts were by him. That Dark Helmet sure knows how to get you to speak up (though, to be fair, none of the next ten posts in comments were written by him).

Okay, onto the community, and who did well on the commenting front. For the third year in a row, John Fenderson was our top commenter, though he seriously upped his game. In 2014, he posted an astounding 6105 comments -- nearly double of last year's 3604. Here's the top 10 list:

Here's a little oddity: I seem to appear on the above list in even years (2010, 2012 and 2014), and don't make it on odd years (2011 and 2013). Guess I'll be commenting less in the new year... Also interesting to see how the list has changed over the years. Only nasch and PaulT were also on the list in 2010, with only PaulT making the list every single year (nasch missed just one year).

Top 10 Most Insightful Commenters, based on how many times they got the lightbulb icon:

Kudos to John Fenderson and That One Guy for dominating the commenting lists this year! Also interesting to see the "funny" numbers are much lower than the insightfuls (and much lower than in the past). Either you guys just aren't as funny as you used to be, or people are getting pickier about the funny voting... Perhaps that's a challenge for someone in the new year...

That's it for last year. If you want to appear on this list next year, time to get cracking...

from the happy-new-year dept

Every year since 2008, my final post on New Year's Eve has been on the topic of "optimism" about the future. It started when I had a few separate people note (in person to me) that they were amazed I seemed so happy and optimistic despite constantly writing about negative things that were happening -- people trying to block innovation, politicians passing crazy laws, judges making bad rulings, etc. As I pointed out then, I actually found it rather easy to stay happy because I had seen how far we've come over the years since Techdirt began, way back in 1997. I had seen how much innovation had happened in spite of attempts to stop it. I had seen how people and innovators routed around the problems. While much of what I wrote about did cover negative things -- and to some people I seemed angry about them -- it was mainly frustration that there were further attempts to slow things down, despite knowing that innovation and the public's interest always prevail in the end. I'm optimistic because I can see it coming, while frustrated because of all the efforts that will slow it down and limit how much of that innovation I'll get to experience in my lifetime.

As I was preparing to write the post for this year, I actually thought it might end up on more of a down note. Something about this past year felt... somehow slightly more exhausting than years past (even as I, personally, completely revamped my sleep schedule and probably got more than double the amount of sleep this year than in past years). But as I started thinking through this year, I realized just how many amazing and wonderfully good things did come to pass.

Early in the year the FCC's pretty weak net neutrality rules were struck down by the court (as most everyone expected), and at the end of the year it seems like the FCC is actually (amazingly) poised to put real net neutrality rules in place. Almost no one would have predicted that Title II reclassification would even be in the discussion these days, yet now it seems likely. That's an astounding shift towards the positive.

At the beginning of the year, the story on patents was still a huge mess. Patent trolls were still running around like crazy causing problems, and the idea of true patent reform seemed remote. Yet, Congress actually came mighty close to a decent (if not perfect) patent reform bill (only to have it killed by the trial lawyers). However, it appears that much stronger patent reform is likely to happen in the next Congress. More importantly (so far), the Supreme Court continued to make rulings that smacked down an over-expansive patent system (and the dreadful rulings of the Federal Circuit). The Alice v. CLS Bank case in particular has already had a massive impact in getting bad patents and bad patent cases tossed out (and an earlier ruling making it easier to get lawyers' fees for bad patent litigation has helped as well).

Surveillance reform turned out to be something of a bust in Congress, but it came very, very close, and there's significant interest in making a real stand in 2015 on both the key surveillance parts of the PATRIOT Act that need to be renewed and on dealing with Executive Order 12333, under which a lot of mass surveillance is really happening. Still, while Congress dithers, innovators are innovating. The number of companies that have upped their encryption game and are taking privacy seriously has been going up rapidly. We may finally be reaching a point where protecting privacy is a real competitive advantage.

We're still in a bit of a holding period on copyright reform, but the concerns and worries about what bad copyright laws have done to expression are getting increased attention and awareness. And, at the same time, alternative business models and services are thriving in incredible ways, making more culture available to more people -- and allowing more content creators to create more content, to reach more people and to make more money than ever before. It's an amazing time to be a creator.

That's not to say there aren't concerns. Congress is still working on some bad laws while ignoring broken laws that need to be fixed (such as CFAA and ECPA). The reaction of law enforcement to greater encryption is ridiculous but won't be going away any time soon. The backroom dealing by the MPAA with state Attorneys General, and the USTR on bad trade deals, shows how those legacy industries aren't giving up on their plans to hobble innovation to protect the interests of big legacy players (and to do so as secretly as possible).

But if you went back just a few years and told your older self what's on the table today, what innovators are working on and what the public is interested in on these issues, your older self likely wouldn't believe it. Real copyright and patent reform wasn't even seen as a possibility. NSA surveillance wasn't talked about in polite company. Net neutrality was a wonk issue for telco nerds. But they're all getting talked about regularly today.

And an awful lot of that is due to the power of the public speaking out. The win over SOPA may feel like it was long ago but it set the framework for the net neutrality battle, and really did help make a big difference in that fight. While similar efforts won't win every battle (NSA reform being one that so far has failed), that fight isn't over yet, and the momentum continues to shift in the right direction. The power of the internet itself to connect people and make such expression possible is truly world-changing. Sometimes it's difficult to see all that in the thick of things, but take a step back and think about just how amazing this time we live in really is.

Here at Techdirt, we were blown away by the support we received for our BeaconReader crowdfunding campaign for reporting on net neutrality. Your contributions helped raise nearly $70,000 which we've put to good use, producing over 100 stories so far and many more to come. We switched the site to default to HTTPS, to better protect your privacy (and we appreciate NameCheap stepping up to sponsor that move). Many of you have helped out as well, supporting us via the Techdirt Insider Shop (and getting some nifty swag in the process). And 2015 is shaping up to be a very big year for us. We have some major announcements about the future of our company that will come pretty early into the new year, so please stay tuned...

As always, however, my final message of the day is a massive thank you to all of you who are a part of the Techdirt community, no matter how you choose to take part. Whether you comment or lurk. Whether we're something you share with all your friends, or are just a guilty pleasure you keep to yourself. Whether you submit stories or engage with us. We appreciate that you're a part of this community, that you're passionate about innovation, the internet, free speech, privacy and a bunch of related issues.

While other sites are pushing their communities away, turning off comments or outsourcing the effort, we still believe that it's the community around here that makes this site so special -- and we look forward to sharing an exciting 2015 (and beyond) with all of you.

It's now been more than 17 years (yikes -- I'm old) that I've been writing Techdirt, and I still think I have the best job in the world. It is an absolute, unquestionable joy each and every day to share these stories, to express opinions and debate interesting topics with all of you. It's the community here that continues to inspire me every single day to see what more we can do. Thank you, once again, for being a part of this effort.

from the five-and-counting dept

If you haven't heard all the episodes of the recently-launched Techdirt Podcast, now's the time to catch up. You can listen to all five episodes below, visit us on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes, or grab the RSS feed.

If you're new to the podcast and wondering where to start, here's a brief episode guide:

from the afp dept

After a short break (and a teaser) last week, it's now time for Episode 3 of the Techdirt Podcast. If you still haven't subscribed, you should follow us on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes, or simply plug the RSS feed into your favorite podcatcher app (we have a few recommendations). Of course, you can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

This week we've got a special guest, and someone who should be familiar to regular Techdirt readers: Amanda Palmer, an artist who has been taking an innovative (and sometimes controversial) approach to succeeding in the music business for a long time. The episode kicks off with Amanda reading an excerpt from her new book, The Art Of Asking, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Let People Help, then moves on into a discussion about the book, her experiences in the music and publishing industries, the anger that has arisen around some of her creative business model experiments, and much more. For the music this week, we've got a clip of Amanda's own The Killing Type from her album Theatre Is Evil. A big thanks to Amanda Palmer for visiting the podcast, and we hope you enjoy the episode!